Mapping Nature across the Americas

Maps are inherently unnatural. Projecting three-dimensional realities onto two-dimensional surfaces, they are abstractions that capture someone’s idea of what matters within a particular place; they require selections and omissions. These very characteristics, however, give maps their importance for understanding how humans have interacted with the natural world, and give historical maps, especially, the power to provide rich insights into the relationship between humans and nature over time. That is just what is achieved in Mapping Nature across the Americas. Illustrated throughout, the essays in this book argue for greater analysis of historical maps in the field of environmental history, and for greater attention within the field of the history of cartography to the cultural constructions of nature contained within maps. This volume thus provides the first in-depth and interdisciplinary investigation of the relationship between maps and environmental knowledge in the Americas—including, for example, stories of indigenous cartography in Mexico, the allegorical presence of palm trees in maps of Argentina, the systemic mapping of US forests, and the scientific platting of Canada’s remote lands.

About the Author

Kathleen A. Brosnan is the Paul and Doris Eaton Travis Chair of Modern History at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Uniting Mountain and Plain: Cities, Law, and Environmental Change along the Front Range , and coeditor, most recently, of City of Lake and Prairie: Chicago’s Environmental History . James R. Akerman is curator of maps at the Newberry Library, and director of the library’s Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography. He is the editor, most recently, of Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation , also published by the University of Chicago Press.